The Vital Role of Play in Childhood

The Vital Role of Play in Childhood

Joan Almon
“The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.”
Ashley Montagu

Over thirty years of working with children, families, and teachers in Waldorf kindergartens all over the world, I have observed one overwhelming similarity: creative play is a central activity in the lives of healthy young children. It helps children weave together all the elements of life as they experience it. It allows them to digest life and make it their own. It is an outlet for the fullness of their creativity, and it is an absolutely critical part of their childhood. With creative play, children blossom and flourish; without it, they suffer a serious decline.

I am hardly the first to note this fact. The central importance of creative play in children’s healthy development is well supported by decades of research. And yet children’s play, in the creative, open-ended sense in which I use the term, is now seriously endangered. School children no longer have the freedom to explore woods and fields and find their own special places. Physical education and recess are being eliminated; new schools are built without playgrounds. Informal neighborhood ball
games are a thing of the past, as children are herded into athletic leagues from age five on.

From all sides—parents, teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists—one hears tales of young children who do not play. Some seem blocked and unable to play. Others long to play, but busy schedules outside school or an overemphasis on focused learning in school have driven play out of their lives. Add to this mixture the hours spent sitting still in front of screens—television, video game, and computer—while children absorb other people’s stories and imaginations but can’t act out their own, and the result is a steady decline in children’s play. This decline will certainly have serious consequences for children and for the future of childhood itself.

In this article I will focus on the play of children before first grade, especially from three to seven. During these years, when play should be flourishing, its development has been thwarted. We may not intend to drive play out of children’s lives, but our policies and practices in schools and at home discourage children from pursuing their own open-ended, self-directed play.

The Nature of Play
If we are to save play we must first understand its nature. Creative play is like a spring that bubbles up from deep within a child. It is refreshing and enlivening and is a natural part of the make-up of every healthy child. It is so fundamental to the make-up of the child that it is often hard to separate play from learning. Whether children are working on new physical skills, social relations, or cognitive content, they approach life with a playful spirit. As a friend said of her eight- month-old recently, “It just seems that she’s working all the time.” But is it work or play? In childhood there is no distinction.

Adults are convinced that we need to “teach” young children. It is certainly true that we need to set an example in all kinds of activities. We also need to create appropriate spaces where children can play and learn, and we need to lend a helping hand—and at times even intervene when things are going wrong. But mostly we need to honor the innate capacity for learning that moves the limbs and fills the souls of every healthy young child. The child’s love of learning is intimately linked with a zest for play.

Nathan at one year came with his parents to the summer house we share as a family. He was delighted to find several staircases in this house, for in his own home there was only one step, and he had long since mastered it. Now he gave full vent to the young child’s wish to climb stairs. Over and over he would climb up and down. We took turnsstanding guard, but he rarely needed our help. He was focused and concentrated and did not like to be taken away from this activity. He gave every sign of being a happy, playful child while climbing, yet he was also clearly exploring
and mastering a new skill and one that was important for his long-term development. Most important, it was a task he set for himself. No one could have told this one-year-old to devote hours to climbing. And no one needed to. He did it himself, as will every healthy child whose sense of movement has not been disturbed.

Another example: Ivana at age four came to kindergarten one Monday morning and proudly announced that she could tie shoes. I must have looked skeptical, since most children at four can’t tie a real bow. Ivana was determined to show me, and she sat down on the floor and untied her shoes. She then retied them into perfect bows, looked at my astonished face, and beamed. Later in the day I asked her mother how Ivana had learned to do this. Her mother laughed and described how over the weekend Ivana had pretended that she was going to a birthday party. She used all the scrap paper she could find and folded it into little birthday packages. She raided her mother’s yarn basket and used scraps of yarn to tie the packages with bows. She probably tied 60 or 70 packages during the weekend until she had at last mastered the art of tying bows.

Again, no one could have assigned Ivana such a task. She clearly felt ready, and what was important was that she did her work in the spirit of play, pretending to go to a birthday party. Learning to tie was not a tedious task but something she enjoyed doing.

The simple truth is that young children are born with a most wonderful urge to grow and learn. They continually develop new skills and capacities, and if they are allowed to set the pace with a bit of help from the adult world they will work at all this in a playful and tireless way. Rather than respecting this innate drive to learn, however, we treat children as if they can learn only what we adults can teach them. We strip them of their innate confidence in directing their own learning, hurry them along, and often wear them out. It is no wonder that so many teachers complain that by age nine or ten children seem burned out and uninterested in learning. This is a great tragedy, for
the love of learning that Nathan and Ivana displayed is meant to last a whole lifetime. Furthermore, it is intimately bound to our capacity to be creative and purposeful.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speaks about the creative state in adults he calls “flow.” Referrring to Csikszentmihalyi’s work, Daniel Goleman and his co-authors in Creative Spirit describe flow as the time “when people are at their peak. Flow can happen in any domain or activity—while painting, playing chess, making love, anything. The one requirement is that your skills so perfectly match the demands of the moment that all self- consciousness disappears.” (Goleman et al., p. 46) In just the same way, children’s play is characterized by an absence of self-consciousness.

The depth of concentration that children display when they are immersed in play is astounding. I think of five-year- old Peter watching intently as two girls in the kindergarten were creating an especially beautiful play scene on a tabletop. They were deeply engrossed and so was he. It happened that on that day the fire department descended on us, for one of the teachers had called them after noticing an electrical smell in her room. Three fire engines roared up our driveway. Peter’s friend Benjamin ran up to him, crying, “Peter, Peter, the fire engines are here!” But Peter was so
intent on watching the play scene that he did not respond. Benjamin tried again with the same result. He shrugged and rushed back to the window to watch the firemen arrive. Finally, Peter emerged from his concentration, saw the fire engines, and hurried to the window.

Peter’s state of mind seems very close to that of a neurosurgeon described by Csikszentmihalyi. He was engrossed in a difficult operation. When the procedure was finished, the surgeon asked about a pile of debris in the corner of the operating room. He had not noticed it before. He then was told that part of the ceiling had caved in during the operation. He had been so engaged in the flow of his work that he had not heard a thing. (Goleman et al., pp. 46– 47)

This state of flow experienced by scientists, physicians, artists, and others may seem a bit scary or intimidating to us. Do we want to enter so wholeheartedly into life and learning? It does not fit the contemporary picture of multi- tasking where one is doing many things at once, but usually none of them very deeply. Yet it is an important state of being if we want to flex our inner capacities to the fullest and offer our greatest gifts to the world. These are the skills children are prepared to develop, and even long to develop. In their education, however, children increasingly find classrooms filled with scripted teaching, computerized learning, and assessment through standardized testing. All of
this trivializes children’s real capacities for life and learning and leaves many with a deep sense of disappointment and frustration.

The Development of Play
The secret to helping young children thrive is to keep the spirit of creativity and of playful learning alive and active. An important ingredient in this is our own work as adults, for children naturally imitate grown-ups. This inspires their play. Their learning is a combination of their own deep inner drive to grow and learn coupled with their imitation of the adults in their environment. These two elements interweave all through early childhood. They provide the underlying basis for play, yet their outer expression changes year by year as children develop.

One of the milestones in play is the development of make-believe play, also known as fantasy play, around age 2 1/2 or 3. Before that, children are more oriented to the real world: their own bodies, simple household objects like pots, pans, and wooden spoons, and simple toys like dolls, trucks, and balls. In their play, toddlers imitate what they see around them; common play themes include cooking, caring for baby, driving cars or trucks, and other everyday events. These themes continue and expand after age three but now children are less dependent on real objects and create what they need from anything that is at hand. Their ability to enter into make-believe allows them to transform
a simple object into a play prop. A bowl becomes a ship, a stick becomes a fishing pole, a rock becomes a baby, and much, much more.

It is fascinating to watch the force of fantasy enter the lives of children. The three-year-old becomes so engaged in make-believe play that objects seem to be in a constant state of transformation. No play episode is ever finished; it is always in the process of becoming something else. The playful three-year-old often leaves a trail of objects as her play evolves from one theme to the next. In contrast, four-year-olds are generally more stationary and thematic in their play. They like to have a “house” to play in, which might also be a ship or a shop, and many enter the “pack-rat” stage where they fill their houses with objects so that it seems they cannot freely move around. This does not bother
them at all, however. Like three-year-olds, they are inspired in the moment by the objects before them. They are quite spontaneous in their ideas for play.

It is always exciting to watch the change in play in the five-year-olds as they enter the kindergarten and announce what they want to play. Their mothers sometimes report that the children wake up in the morning with an idea for play in mind. Sometimes they play out the same theme for days or even weeks on end, developing it differently each time. One can see them gain focus as they come in touch with their own ideas and have the will to carry them out in playful detail.

There is one more important aspect to the development of make-believe play that usually does not occur until children are six. At this age they still love fantasy play but often will play out a situation without the use of props. They may build a house or castle but leave it unfurnished, then sit inside it and talk through their play, for now they are able to see the images clearly in their minds’ eyes. This stage can be described as imaginative play, for the children now have the capacity to form an inner image. It is around this time that a child will say something like “I can see Grandma whenever I want. I just have to close my eyes.” Or she may set up a play scene with her toys but close her
eyes and play it out “inside.”

Dorothy and Jerome Singer, both psychologists at Yale University, have devoted their lives to the subject of children’s play. They summarize their experiences in this way: Over many years of observing children in free play, we have found that those who engage in make-believe, what
Piaget calls symbolic play, are more joyful, and smile and laugh more often than those who seem to be at odds with themselves—the children who wander aimlessly around the nursery school or daycare center looking for something to do, who play in a preservative way with a few blocks, or who annoy their peers by teasing them or interrupting their games. (Singer and Singer, p. 64)

The Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Benefits of Play
When children are happily at play in a kindergarten there is a wonderful hum in the room. A deep sense of well being emanates from the children. This should be reason enough to foster and protect play, but research also points to a number of important gains linked to a child’s ability to engage in healthy, creative play. Sara Smilansky, an Israeli researcher, studied children at play in Israel and the United States. She defines dramatic play as taking place when a child pretends to be someone else and sociodramatic play as those times when two or more children cooperate in such role–playing. She summarizes her research as follows: “The results point to dramatic and sociodramatic play as a strong medium for the development of cognitive and socioemotional skills.”